


Brother's Keeper

by wreathed



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Incest, M/M, Season/Series 03, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-30
Updated: 2014-04-30
Packaged: 2018-01-20 22:52:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1528655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreathed/pseuds/wreathed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Sherlock could read minds?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brother's Keeper

**Author's Note:**

> For Pip's First Annual Great Eleventh Of March Fic Challenge Classic, (loosely) fulfilling the prompts 'extraordinary' and 'a moment of understanding / clarity'. 
> 
> With thanks to Poose for stellar beta work.

It happens about half an hour after Sherlock arrives at the cheery, _no-reason-in particular!_ gathering Mary’s insisted on having at the end of the working week.

He is just thinking, as he takes a long sip of apple juice from the little plastic cup he had been handed, how pointless this gathering ultimately is, how happy John is looking these days, how unusual it was for Mycroft to turn up to this sort of thing (even if the host had insisted, unless they happened to be king of some country or other).

And then he can think no longer, for there are other people’s thoughts pushing his aside. Impossible, but unmistakable.

And, my God, it is _boring_.

John is thinking _my philtrum is definitely colder since she made me shave_ and Molly is thinking _that video with all the rabbits in was_ adorable _; would Tom think I’m weird if I showed it to him? Best not_ and Lestrade is thinking _maybe I should make use of that Big Yellow Self Storage Company special offer and then I could move to a smaller flat_.

Mary is thinking about things Sherlock doesn’t understand, but they do not seem to match up with what he knows about her already. He should remember to talk to John about them.

Mycroft’s thoughts are going too fast for Sherlock to truly make them out; a combination of the scientific and the diplomatic, he is busy calculating something. Amidst the chaos, it is restful.

*

After two days of it, he desperately wants everyone to shut up. It hasn’t even made him understand normal people any better, it has just made him despise them more – their slowness, their monotony, their lack of grace.

( _No, not the blue heels tonight,_ the young woman who has just crossed the road and come into his range of thinking, _they give me cankles_. As if this is useful or coherent information to anyone.)

After a few days of this, Sherlock finds that he can use his mind palace to shut people out to a certain extent, but this leaves him alone with his thoughts too much. It ensures more intelligent conversation, but he often leads himself around in circles.

He suspects his brother’s involvement, somehow. He always does.

*

The next crime scene he walks onto, he can’t help but read the guilt in the victim’s husband’s mind before he’s even been told what offence has been committed. A bit unbelievable, even for Sherlock Holmes, and he doesn’t want to be implicated as a suspect for solving the case with absolutely no information to hand. So, of course, he needs to go through the motions, same as ever, for the courts need much better proof than something that sounds like a flippant lie.

It is the arresting without the fun of deduction. He feels like a common policeman.

And that’s when he decides for certain that this way of being is something he needs to stop. He picks up the phone.

* 

“How are you getting on?” Mycroft asks him (almost kindly) when he at last deigns to return Sherlock’s many calls. (Sherlock hates to seem desperate, but if he has to endure one more imagination-playback of what, given the chance, John would apparently do to someone called Scarlett Johansson…)

“Change me back. Now. Whatever it is you’ve done to me.”

“My God, it doesn’t work over the phone, does it?”

“No,” Sherlock grits out between his teeth. “But I know it was you. Who else would it be?” Who else would be as mean. Who else would be as clever. Who else would be so Holmesian.

“Perhaps it would be best to speak to you in person,” Mycroft says. Then he hangs up.

*

Sherlock lets himself in (using yet another key he has pickpocketed, when will Mycroft ever learn, or perhaps he just doesn’t care) and shuts the panelled study door.

Mycroft stops the treadmill and steps off it, the sweat from exercising shining on the back of his neck. His thoughts still move very quickly, but he is out breath from running and hasn’t got his mind on anything particularly complex, so Sherlock has an easier time understanding this time around. _His metabolism might well slow down in five years time,_ Sherlock can make out in Mycroft’s thinking, and Sherlock gives a short laugh as he pulls up Mycroft’s desk chair and sits down in front of him. “No it won’t,” Sherlock says. “And you’re wondering where you put your bottle of water. It’s on top of the cupboard by the door. Imbecile.”

Out loud, Mycroft only sighs and sips at the water Sherlock has located. _I might have slipped something into your drink at the party_ Mycroft thinks, slowly enough for Sherlock to understand him. _I’m awfully sorry about it._

“How does it work?” Sherlock demands. He has not felt this disorientated since Dartmoor. He cannot stand that Mycroft is showing off – rather than speaking to him to communicate, he is just trusting that Sherlock can and will read his mind. It gives Mycroft far too much godlikeness. 

_Something to do with electrolytes…_ Sherlock hears in Mycroft’s voice, in his own head, and it makes him suddenly imagine what they would be like as fraternal twins, entwined together in the womb. It is searingly intimate to have someone else’s thoughts in your head alongside your own, and for that person to be someone who knows so many of his secrets… it is almost unbearable. _MI6 have been trying to optimise it as a weapon for years. As to the exact scientific mechanism,_ Mycroft continues, for a moment looking away from Sherlock’s gaze, _I’m not actually authorised to know._

“That must be so frustrating.”

“I thought I’d use you as my guinea pig,” Mycroft tells him out loud. “Assumed you wouldn’t mind playing the superhero.”

“Put poison through your own veins instead. Why not?”

“People,” Mycroft says, and Sherlock agrees. “And you used to do such a fine job of putting poison through your veins on your own.”

“Is there an antidote?” Sherlock asks. “Is it at all addictive? Will I have to wean myself off?”

“I would not bring you to any further addiction, I promise you. Tell me what you have experienced,” Mycroft asks him, fascinated. “I cannot free you until I know.”

“When people think in words, I hear those words. When people are thinking in images, sometimes all I can gleam is a hazy rendering; sometimes I can ascertain precisely what they are considering. It depends.”

“What about this?” Mycroft says aloud, before projecting a mess of German, French, Russian, swapping between the three languages in the middle of his sentences.

“It comes through in the languages you are thinking them.”

“Interesting. What else can you tell me?” Mycroft is saying this calmly, as if they get on with each other better and are talking over tea, not as if he has drugged his younger brother and Sherlock is sitting, overwhelmed, hot from still wearing his coat and scarf indoors, and Mycroft is red-faced and wearing running gear that sits flush with his thighs and torso.

“You have to be quite close to someone to pick up their mind, but you don’t have to be touching. There are regular pulses, beats, that everybody has; the brainstem, I’d imagine, telling your lungs to breathe and your heart to beat. That can be distracting. And I loathe to admit it, but you often think too fast for me to work out what you’re considering unless you’re purposely trying to project your thoughts,” Sherlock tells him, quietly. “Everyone else I’m much cleverer than and I listen to their minds drone on all day, but you… ”

He hadn’t really noticed before, so focussed as they are on the contents of the mind and not the body, but Mycroft (lips shiny from the water) has stepped closer.

“How much control do you have?” Mycroft asks. “Over what you hear and see?”

“Very little. It’s immensely irritating.”

“What am I thinking about?” Mycroft is looking straight into his eyes now, and its images, not words, that Sherlock now senses.

“The prime minister.” Sherlock makes it out clearly. “Talking to Irene Adler?”

“I’m imagining that,” Mycroft informs him, voice low. “Don’t worry, it never happened. We’re going to see if it’s any different for you with a true memory, now. Concentrate.”

“An animal, four legs, it’s becoming clearer… oh. Redbeard, running towards me… ” Sherlock says, frowning. He suddenly feels a little lost. “God, have you misplaced your Rorschach cards? This isn’t a family therapy session,” Sherlock mutters. “I’ve done what you wanted. Just give me the neutralising pill or tell me when it wears off or whatever I need to know, and leave me in peace.

“One more,” Mycroft asks, at last sitting down in the chair opposite Sherlock, quieter still. “Please.”

First, there is a single memory, so long ago that Sherlock had thought Mycroft must have forgotten it. They are seventeen and twenty-four years old, sitting on the swing seat hanging from the oak tree at the bottom of their parents’ garden, shielded from the house. It’s summer, a very hot one, at the end of Mycroft’s final visit home before he starts his mysterious civil service job. Sherlock is everything Mycroft was not in adolescence – disobedient of authority, slim, friendless. Mycroft is in crisp tailoring minus the suit jacket and sweating in the heat; Sherlock and his sharp elbows are wearing a dark t-shirt and loose shorts.

They kiss goodbye, but not as brothers should. It had not seemed significant at the time; even Sherlock, at the age of seventeen, got erections from all sorts of insignificant things. And Mycroft… it shames Sherlock, but he had not noticed Mycroft’s aroused state until this moment, when the memory is played back

Then there are not-memories, things Mycroft’s made up (Sherlock recognises the difference now). Sherlock (still a teenager) rubbing himself off on Mycroft’s thigh; Sherlock (university-age) sitting naked on Mycroft’s bed; Sherlock (same age as he is now) locking Mycroft’s bedroom door and shoving him against a wall (this one surprises Sherlock in particular).

(He does not need his newly-gifted power to know that Mycroft’s lungs are breathing louder and his heart is beating faster.)

“Why are you only telling me about this now?”

Mycroft blinks at the interruption, swallows, and Sherlock hopes that he feels scrutinized. _It’s not something I can voice aloud. Forgive me._

“I don’t mind, you know. I value any power and control I have over you, however sordid it may be.”

_Brothers love and hurt and change each other. From Cain and Abel, all the way down._

“I loathe it when you try and go poetical.”

Nothing much gets both Sherlock’s cock hard and his mind engaged, nothing is ever _enough_ , but now he is overwhelmed not just by his own desire (to connect with Mycroft, to unseat him, to simply _find out what will happen_ ) but by Mycroft’s projected lust alongside his own. And, for someone as self-obsessed as he, it is gratifying to feel from his perspective how much Mycroft wants him to do… any number of things.

“We shouldn’t… I shouldn’t touch you.” Mycroft is looking at Sherlock’s erection now, and Sherlock can sense Mycroft’s own desire: a heat that drags his attention beyond his torso, _beat beat beat_ of his blood in tight jogging trousers. “But, I thought… I could think about us. And watch you react. A kind of experiment.”

Sherlock snorts. “As if that’s any better.”

“It’s better in the eyes of many. The drug is a prototype; sharing the same thoughts is hardly a transgression, as there not yet any laws pertaining to it.”

“I should have known someone like you sees a country’s laws as the only possible expression of morality.” He manages a smirk. “Look into my eyes again. It makes your thoughts clearer.”

And so Mycroft is watching him, exacting, giving Sherlock one hundred percent of his intelligent attention as Sherlock unbuttons his coat, undoes his trousers and pushes down his underwear. His cock, erect between his untucked shirttails, is flushed a deep red.

He feels an overwhelming urge to close his eyes, but he keeps them open.

Mycroft projects a series of images, and Sherlock touches himself as he sees them, more for Mycroft’s pleasure than his own. He can see into Mycroft’s head but Mycroft cannot see into his; yet, he is not sure who holds the greater power, who knows the most about the other.

 _Mycroft twisting Sherlock’s arm and pushing him against the wall, gently biting the back of his neck; Mycroft taking Sherlock’s scarf from around his neck and tying his hands together with it; Mycroft fucking Sherlock spectacularly against the mahogany of his desk at work; Irene, riding crop in hand_ – that’s for him alone, Sherlock supposes, and it doesn’t do it for him because he can feel the taint of Mycroft’s distaste for women behind it all. He scowls. _A different tack, then_ thinks Mycroft briefly, and then there’s _Sherlock above him, fucking himself on Mycroft’s cock; Sherlock wanking Mycroft off with one hand, pulling a belt tighter and tighter around Mycroft’s neck with the other; Mycroft congratulating Sherlock on solving a fiendishly difficult case and then sinking to his knees, slowly sucking off Sherlock’s length–_

Sherlock comes; his orgasm is sudden and overwhelming. Most of his release lands on his bare thighs. He wipes it off with Mycroft’s gym towel.

Mycroft hasn’t done anything but watch. Mycroft, heated, treadmill still on at the back of the room, looks as if he may have just had nothing more inappropriate than a strenuous jog. But Sherlock can sense Mycroft’s thoughts on how debauched he looks, slouched spent in this chair, and how hard Mycroft is. He does not offer to do anything about it.

 _Inside the cupboard the water bottle was on,_ Mycroft thinks, eyes turned away from Sherlock now, heart still hammering in his chest. _Two white pills. Nausea’s a side effect. You’ll feel fine in twelve hours._

“Say it out loud. Say something out loud. This isn’t fair.” There is something, always something, in Mycroft that brings out the part of him that is a petulant child.

 _Later,_ Mycroft thinks. _When you’re back to normal._

“Neither of us were ever very normal,” Sherlock says. “Were we?”

He takes a swig of water, swallows both pills, and leaves.


End file.
